Although the stereotype is that people who run up their credit cards do so charging luxury items, this is often not the reality. When money is tight people often find they have to charge day-to-day expenses like groceries, co-payments for doctors’ visits, prescriptions or car repairs. When a financial crisis like divorce, the sudden loss of a job or a spouse occurs, it can take no time at all to max out credit cards on lawyer’s bills, funeral arrangement costs, health insurance, child care, medicine…and on and on. Sometimes families find they are able to manage the first wave of expenses but are stretched so thin that when a second wave of expenses hits, or the next minor event that costs money occurs, they may not be able to manage. Each wave of expenses may bring you closer to the edge of what you can pay financially.

For example, let’s look at what happens when a two-income family divorces. One spouse is now responsible for raising children on half the family’s previous combined income AND still meet the same monthly mortgage payment, car payment, insurance premiums, etc. If the couple was stretched thin prior to divorcing, the same responsibilities can now easily push the remaining spouse past the financial breaking point.

Or consider what happens when a family is struggling to meet their living expenses on two incomes and then one spouse is laid off. Suddenly a mortgage that was difficult to pay every month may become impossible. If their local housing market makes it difficult to sell their house and to find a house they can afford in their school district, the couple is going to have to look farther away from the working spouse’s job to find an affordable home.

With so many walking a thin financial tightrope, using credit for day-to-day living expenses rather than luxuries, and being vulnerable to unexpected emergencies that create extra financial demands, the question is how did we get to this point?